Two great fields of service lay open before those who were to achieve by steam the mastery of the inland waterways.On the one hand the cotton kingdom of the South, now demanding great stores of manufactured goods, produce, and machinery, was waiting to be linked to the valleys and industrial cities of the Middle West;and, on the other hand, along those great eastward and westward rivers, the Ohio and Missouri, lay the commerce of the prairies and the Great Plains.But before the steamboat could serve the inland commerce of the West, it had to be constructed on new lines.The craft brought from the seaboard were of too deep draft to navigate shallow streams which ran through this more level country.
The task of constructing a great inland river marine to play the dual role of serving the cotton empire and of extending American migration and commerce into the trans-Mississippi region was solved by Henry Shreve when he built the Washington at Wheeling in 1816.Shreve was the American John Hawkins.Hawkins, that sturdy old admiral of Elizabethan days, took the English ship of his time, trimmed down the high stern and poop decks, and cut away the deep-lying prow and stern, after the fashion of our modern cup defenders, and in a day gave England the key to sea mastery in the shape of a new ship that would take sail and answer her rudder beyond anything the maritime world until then had known.Shreve, like Hawkins, flagrantly ignoring the conventional wisdom of his day and craft, built the Washington to sail on the water instead of in it, doing away altogether with a hold and supplying an upper deck in its place.
To few inventors, indeed, does America owe a greater debt of thanks than to this Ohio River shipbuilder.A dozen men were on the way to produce a Clermont had Fulton failed; but Shreve had no rival in his plan to build a flat-bottomed steamboat.The remarkable success of his design is attested by the fact that in two decades the boats built on his model outweighed in tonnage all the ships of the Atlantic seaboard and Great Lakes combined.
Immediately the Ohio became in effect the western extension of the great national highway and opened an easy pathway for immigration to the eastern as well as the western lands of the Mississippi Basin.The story goes that an old phlegmatic negro watched the approach of one of the first steamboats to the wharf of a Southern city.Like many others, he had doubted the practicability of this new-fangled Yankee notion.The boat, however, came and went with ease and dispatch.The old negro was converted."By golly," he shouted, waving his cap, "the Mississippi's got her Massa now."The Mississippi had indeed found her master, but only by slow degrees and after intervals of protracted rebellion did she succumb to that master.Luckily, however, there was at hand an army of unusual men--the "alligator-horses" of the flatboat era--upon whom the steamboat could call with supreme confidence that they would not fail.Theodore Roosevelt has said of the Western pioneers that they "had to be good and strong--especially, strong." If these men upon whom the success of the steamboat depended were not always good, they were beyond any doubt behemoths in strength.
The task before them, however, was a task worthy of Hercules.The great river boldly fought its conquerors, asking and giving no quarter, biding its time when opposed by the brave but crushing the fearful on sight.In one respect alone could it be depended upon--it was never the same.It is said to bring down annually four hundred million tons of mud, but its eccentricity in deciding where to wash away and where to deposit its load is still the despair of river pilots.The great river could destroy islands and build new ones overnight with the nonchalance of a child playing with clay.It could shorten itself thirty miles at a single lunge.It could move inland towns to its banks and leave river towns far inland.It transferred the town of Delta, for instance, from three miles below Vicksburg to two miles above it.
Men have gone to sleep in one State and have wakened unharmed in another, because the river decided in the night to alter the boundary line.In this way the village of Hard Times, the original site of which was in Louisiana, found itself eventually in Mississippi.Were La Salle to descend the river today by the route he traversed two and a half centuries ago, he would follow dry ground most of the way, for the river now lies practically everywhere either to the right or left of its old course.
If the Mississippi could perform such miracles upon its whole course without a show of effort, what could it not do with the little winding canal through its center called by pilots the "channel"? The flatboatmen had laboriously acquired the art of piloting the commerce of the West through this mazy, shifting channel, but as steamboats developed in size and power the man at the wheel had to become almost a superman.He needed to be.He must know the stage of water anywhere by a glance at the river banks.He must guess correctly the amount of "fill" at the head of dangerous chutes, detect bars "working down," distinguish between bars and "sand reefs" or "wind reefs" or "bluff reefs" by night as well as by day, avoid the" breaks" in the "graveyard"behind Goose Island, navigate the Hat Island chutes, or find the "middle crossing" at Hole-in-the-Wall.He must navigate his craft in fogs, in storms, in the face of treacherous winds, on black nights, with thousands of dollars' worth of cargo and hundreds of lives at stake.
As the golfer knows each knoll and tuft of grass on his home links, so the pilot learned his river by heart.Said one of these pilots to an apprentice:
